Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Movie town

Twelve recent movies in just over 1,000
words, and not a mainstream movie in sight. Well maybe just one. Could this
happen if we were living in Thunder Bay?

Man on
Fire

Tony Scott’s Mexico-set revenge thriller
has style to burn, like all his films, but ultimately it’s one of those films
where the technical facility underlines the mediocrity of the material to an
almost depressing extent. Denzel Washington plays a troubled bodyguard (not that
Washington’s good at conveying troubled, but that seems to be the idea)
protecting a young girl; when she’s kidnapped and apparently killed, he goes on
a roaring rampage of revenge (as Uma Thurman might put it). Washington’s
behaviour is vastly over the top (he’s referred to as an artist of death) –
given the ending, it seems intended as a symbolically redemptive descent into
hell. Whatever.

I’m
Not Scared

An Italian film, directed by Gabriele
Salvatores, about a young boy in a tiny community who stumbles across a
kidnapped child hidden in a cellar. The movie gets its visual and dramatic
charge from the contrast between luscious golden cornfields that go on forever,
and dark claustrophobic spaces charged with foreboding – the orchestration of
mood compensates for the fairly straightforward plot and the somewhat thin
thematic underpinnings. In many ways the film seems to evoke ET – with the kidnapped child almost
resembling some ethereal alien being – and those who resist Spielberg’s film
may well have a similar reaction here.

Go
Further

Ron Mann’s documentary follows “actor and
activist” Woody Harrelson on a consciousness-raising bus tour in 2001,
promoting organic living.It’s a modest
endeavour, and Harrelson doesn’t seem too disingenuous when he says that the
conversion of just one person would justify the whole project for him. The
film, an ambling, loosely structured thing, is just about as consequential as
its subject, but at least seems aware of its limitations. As an experience it’s
generally more like hanging out in the hemp store than actually watching a
movie, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Cremaster
1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Matthew Barney’s already semi-legendary Cremaster cycle, made over the last ten
years, finally arrived at the Cinematheque, then at the Carlton. Cremaster 1 is like a gorgeous art
installation that you circle round and slowly absorb – it’s strangely serene,
and occasionally reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick (with hindsight it seems very much
like the womb of the cycle). Cremaster 2
retains some of the first film’s visual concepts but is much more open ended
and allusive – sweeping Harry Houdini, Gary Gilmore, Canadian Mounties, rodeos
and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir into an alternately playful and troubled
melting pot of human experience.Cremaster 3, at three hours running
almost as long as the other four films put together, starts with the series’
most blatant fantasy, includes its most meticulous narratives, and then for the
last half hour explodes in a delirium of weird and wonderful performance art.
It has an opening quotation on the will as the generator of character, and the
film can indeed be seen largely as a paean to persistence and individuality.

Cremaster
4 juxtaposes a motorcyclingrace on the Isle of Man with another weird
(but at this point in the series, oddly affecting) narrative of creation and
transcendence, and is maybe its most accessible metaphor. Cremaster 5, featuring Ursula Andress, follows a more familiar,
operatic aesthetic for a while, placing the films’ preoccupations in a broader
context and perhaps toying with art’s capacity to become oppressive, before
returning to a summation of the cycle’s primary visual motifs. Overall it’s an
amazing achievement by Barney. The films are as consciously “arty’ as anything
you’ll ever see – their perversity and incredible individuality serve as a
constant challenge to all preconceptions, but despite that they achieve a
remarkable degree of coherence. With the director himself turning up in a
variety of weird guises, the series is certainly narcissistic, but Barney’s multi-dimensional
mirror also seems at times to reflect almost the entire span of creative
endeavour, and it’s thrilling both to watch and to contemplate afterwards.

The
Saddest Music in the World

Guy Maddin’s movies look as if they were
dug up in a graveyard; the artful archaicism and visual murkiness intertwine
with his odd, allusive narratives to create something highly distinctive and
perhaps brilliant – outside of clearly experimental figures like Stan Brakhage,
and indeed Matthew Barney, it’s hard to think of a director who makes film seem
so much like a visceral object of sculpture. The new film has Isabella
Rossellini as a rich double amputee who sponsors a contest in 1930’s Winnipeg
to find the saddest music in the world – family intrigue, off-centre sexuality
and the music itself form a delirious fetishistic parchment. It’s easier to
grasp than Maddin’s other movies, which for such an idiosyncratic filmmaker
might actually stand as a slight debit.

Mayor
of the Sunset Strip

George Hickenlooper’s documentary about
Rodney Bingenheimer, a long-standing LA DJ (since 1976) and fringe rock
industry figure (one-time club owner; stand-in for Davy Jones on The Monkees; partygoer), is diverting
without ever seeming particularly necessary. The film wheels on an array of
celebrities from Nancy Sinatra to Courtney Love to testify to his...uh..well,
it’s never clear what exactly they’re testifying to – even his stated passion
for the music doesn’t come across very deeply. The movie tries to paint
Bingenheimer as a poignant figure, but it’s a familiar kind of special pleading
(for example, the biography of porn star Ron Jeremy took exactly the same
tack).

The
Far Side of the Moon

Robert Lepage’s latest film posits that
space travel is primarily a form of narcissism, and then spins this somewhat
obscure thesis into an odd, loosely-assembled narrative about an underachieving
scientist and his weatherman brother (both played by Lepage himself), contrasting
their ups and downs with childhood flashbacks. The allure of other worlds winds
through the film, often generating some quite beautiful visuals even when the
general quasi-magic realist approach seems fairly familiar. Like other Lepage
films, it feels a bit over-calculated at times, but in the end the film finds a
plausible way to allow the dream of space to infiltrate everyday life, and it
(literally) defies gravity.

Spring,
Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring

This gentle film by Korean director Kim
Di-Duk begins with an aging monk and his young acolyte, living a serene life in
picture book isolation, then revisits the location at four subsequent points in
time, during which their lives undergo harsh disruption before circling to a
new beginning. There’s nothing too surprising about this film – although it
seems slow and meditative by mainstream standards, it’s a knowingly accessible
and ingratiating piece of storytelling, artfully tapping a wide emotional
register.The movie’s ultimate direction
is predictable from quite early on, but its primary appeal - a beautifully
visualized fantasy of triumphing over civilization by rejecting it – is hard to
resist.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).